The protagonist of Dancing with Myself has a problem common
to would-be or soon-to-be lovers: stomach cramps, “butterflies.” Why this may
seem interesting is that, in the context of the sonnet sequence, the
protagonist’s butterflies confirm that he is not as old, weathered, and
eternally resigned as he might appear to himself to be. He is still open to
dynamism, change, and outside influences impinging on his consciousness. Keats’
Psyche is simultaneously a woman, a goddess, and an ideal (Beauty); the female
Muse for Dancing with Myself is just a woman, who, as down in the dirt and
close to the earth as Psyche, is also perverse, a schemer, and an intellectual.
She is more sophisticated than Psyche, if also more corrupt. The Dark Lady
archetype, at the other end of things, steals from this Muse some of the more
germane things the protagonist sees in her— intelligence, refinement, human
gravitas, soulfulness. This human gravitas, a profound sense of human foible
and frailty, is one reason the protagonist here feels his guts churn— this Muse
is a formidable one, not merely light like Psyche, or merely dark like the Dark
Lady in Shakespeare. She is a complex personality, forcing complex contexts to
manifest around her, also forcing those who deal with her intimately to wrestle
with their own complexities. The whole syndrome, laden with a healthy dose of
out-and-out lust, spells itself out in “Stomach Flu”:

It’s like, I have a virus

in my guts that forces

me to puke you up every

time I eat anything tasty.

I puke, shaking through.

I know what I need to do—

stop cigarettes & coffee &

booze & toffee & all things

that seem excremental

when lust for life has gone

rusty. Your increased bust

has made me allergic to

cherry flavored colas, syrups,

brandy, candy fits, & shit.

Part of the quandary would seem to be that this protagonist
has a difficult time dealing with the extreme approach to physicality of his
Muse. We have already spelled out what the subtext seems to be (and why this
poem might end with “shit”), but the deeper ramification of the subtext for the
protagonist would manifest here as his queasy sense of attraction/repulsion to
her. He is, thus, confused by the acute emotions evoked by an insatiable
mistress he only half understands. The association of love and sickness is
conventional, as are the end-rhymes employed here, which make this one of the
most musically striking sonnets in the bunch. The two mini-catalogues, of
different sensual enjoyments, heighten the sense that what the Muse here
represents to the protagonist is severe, ecstatic enjoyment in dichotomous
relation to equally severe, ecstatic (as in, jumping out of one’s skin)
discomfort— all the result of sexual transgression, of boundaries being
crossed. The torque on Shakespeare is that, rather than tormenting the
protagonist with another man, this Dark Lady torments the protagonist with what
she is willing to do with her own body, and her unique relationship to
physicality, and to intercourse. Perhaps the protagonist has the guts to go through
things with her and do as she asks, perhaps he does not— it is obvious that he
wants to, but equally obvious that he holds up the proverbial cross to her
vulpine energies, and the sense that she sucks the life out of him with her
brazen, experienced demands, which make him feel like a naïf.